Canada: They left the city to start a farm, and this new wave of farmers is urban-raised, university-educated and committed to environmental practices
A 2018 Statistics Canada report said that the proportion of younger people and women taking up farming has increased.
By Cristina Petrucci
Special to the Star
July 20, 2021
Excerpt:
“I never had a green thumb,” said Aminah Haghighi, “I could barely keep houseplants alive.” Haghighi is the founder and head lettuce of Raining Gold Family Growers established in January 2021 and based in Hillier, Prince Edward County. She is currently farming a quarter of an acre and has a direct to consumer sales approach. Starting in January, Haghighi had to be quick on her feet to determine what she could sell at that time. “I came up with the idea of selling microgreens as that is something you can grow indoors under lights on shelves,” she said. Her efforts paid off. She had a total of 80 CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) subscribers and raised just under $10,000 in revenue. “That was the first time I felt connected with the community, because they wanted to see me succeed,” she tells me.
Ultimately what led her to become a farmer is her keen ability to solve problems and doing it as quickly as possible.
Oh, and the pandemic also played a major role.
“A few weeks before the first lockdown in Ontario, my second daughter was born,” she explained, “everything was slowly coming to a halt all over the world, and I didn’t really know what grocery stores would look like and we all thought the world was basically ending.” That’s when Haghighi decided to rip up the grass in her Toronto home and start growing in her small backyard garden.
